Driving home, Johanna clenched her fist, the hand that held the racquet when she played, up against her breast, and, steering with her left hand, pulled off the road beside the Fort Randolph churchyard. A small, square church with painted white wood siding had been built beside the road in the early part of the century by Congregationalists from New England. A graveyard stretched toward the beach. An old stand of tall palms with saw palmetto undergrowth bracketed the graveyard on two sides, and another swath separated it from the beach. From Rhode Island originally, she was more at home here than most places in her present life.
The palmettos formed a tranquil, barbed zone between her and the white flag of sand and surf where the sea came in always at the moment. The gap seemed the most important thing in the world. The tall palms slapped and the leaves of the palmetto sawed together like the ticking of disjointed clocks, while beyond them the surf began and fell, began and fell, a recompense for her clenched fist. She walked half way down among the gravestones, shut her eyes, and let the surf beat time. She felt herself dissolving in the wound of the sound. She felt close to her heart. That was what she had to do, the most important thing in the world, to stay close to her heart.
She knelt, straightened her elbow to uncover her breast, pressed her forehead against an upright gravestone, and put her arm around it. Her father, a big man in a beautiful suit, a lawyer, a power, with a head like a lion, his arm around Jack Kennedy in the picture in their living room, dead, cancer, smoking, drinking. Where was he now in her life? She'd raged at him, wanted him dead then, but now his death stepped toward her own reaching out his hand. She saw in her breast, where cancer was now known to lurk, a tiny figure of herself, bound to her, as Gulliver was bound to the earth by the Lilliputians, bound by myriad tiny strands, the fibers of the cancer threading their way into her body. Oh the dead, the dead, all their familiar phrases, their personal ways. Her mother—a big, gorgeous woman in the picture on her dressing table, expensively dressed, coifed, jeweled, lips filled with blood, who loved to tickle her: a suicide. She felt the thread running through the little image of herself stitched to her chest like a grave marker lying on the earth. The grave markers pressed flat on the earth like stepping stones to the sea, like seals hunkering to the sea. Her best friend back when she was first married, Estelle, the most creative person in the world, killed by a drunk asshole in a sports utility vehicle, the most unjust thing in the world. Tom, her husband's father, a dried up man, a cartoon of capitalism, except gaunt, in his thicket of financial filament—; no, that was not the way Tom saw him. Tom saw him as a huge figure hunched over him. But Tom had shed no tears when he died and so she had to picture him. If Tom had only cried, then the cartoon man would not be here with her.
Nor had he cried when she told him what the doctor said. Some years ago he had stopped crying. It was all hers here in the early afternoon. The grave markers hunkering down to the sea. Herself, threaded in agony in the place of her breast. How much would they take? The doctors acted reassuring, said they would not remove the muscle. She could play tennis again in four months, after the chemotherapy. She had told her daughters, who looked confused about the chemotherapy. "They will put poison in my blood. Do you understand that?" They had nodded softly and returned to the theatre where the actors now rehearsed with them every afternoon. Johanna stood. The bright glitters from the one-o'clock sun on the water, vibrating like the clicking palmettos, jittered in her eyes. The little tied-up figure of herself, of her life—she had always been tied up, tied up in her father first by fear, then by hate, then by love, tied up in Marxism,—she had been an activist in her twenties,—tied up now, not to Tom exactly, he had become too still, but to her....her what? It was not to herself, not to her heart. "Tied," she said breathily, and pushed her hand palm out toward the sea, as if shielding herself from the water's glitter and the clicking of the palmettos. She had always been tied; she had pressed against the bonds with her enthusiasm; it had been the most important thing in the world to keep pushing against bonds, but she had always been tied, tied to her own chest. Now the eagle had come. The actor said he wanted to model his life after Prometheus. The eagle had come and torn the threads, torn the threads of her DNA, and maybe the deadly fragments were running loose in her body. She raised her hands and dragged her fingers through the air as if she were trying out for the part of the eagle. Why did the eagle tear Prometheus' chest? She could not recall.
The light seemed to be passing judgment upon her, on her care for her dead, illuminating her stumbling ascent from them, judging her capacity to now face this horrid little creature, freed, sawing at her breast, sawing at her life thread, judging her capacity to muster her feelings. The dead should process in the earth, not eat at her breast. She was afraid she would be lazy—the chemotherapy, the despair, the sweet release that no one would expect her to carry on—but would Tom?—afraid she would just sit there, using the drugs if she was in pain, drunk with the ebbing of life, she feared that more than anything in the world. Not to go on caring would be worse than any pain, worse than death.
A gust of wind from the surf set the palmettos scraping and brought salt to her breath. She would be ugly: hair lost, wigged like a blue-hair lady, the flat scar where she was bound to herself, where the eagle tore the threads away. Fuck them, the people who would see, fuck their sight. They had shown her the scar, like a tombstone, ugly but not supine.
